Media Mentions

Any major tax bill has unintended consequences and hidden loopholes. But the current Republican tax effort just bristles with such potential miscues. It's a slipshod product, legislated with minimal transparency and analysis and with a premium on partisan politics. The Senate is slated to vote this week on a tax bill that's similar to the one the House passed on Nov. 16. Both call for huge tax cuts, primarily for corporations and upper-income individuals, with little, sometimes nothing, for many middle-class taxpayers. Both parade as tax reform, but do little to reorganize the tax system as the last real tax reform did in a bipartisan measure passed in 1986...Stephen Shay, a Harvard University law school lecturer, tax lawyer and former Treasury official, has predicted that the rushed legislation "will be rife with undiscovered loopholes that increase the windfalls and scope of the deficit." The Finance Committee did hold an Oct. 3 hearing, he noted, but it lacked substance and was "irrelevant except to permit the committee majority to say a hearing was held."

As the nation faces the frequency of sexual harassment and assault at work, both experts who study the problem and the agency that enforces laws against it say that it’s women at the bottom of the labor market who suffer sexual harassment most often and are least likely to see anything like justice. Their experiences also suggest that the lines between predators and complicit cover artists don’t fall neatly along gender lines — often, the stories include women who overlooked sexual assaults or even facilitated harassment of female workers with less power to fight it...Vinson is a former Washington bank clerk who filed the suit which established the legal concept of the “hostile work environment” and prompted the Supreme Court to declare this a form of discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Vinson is also one of several black women who brought litigation central to almost every sexual harassment case which reaches a courtroom today, said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University and a legal historian.

After a 1993 fire, accidentally triggered by federal authorities, killed 75 members of an obscure Christian sect near Waco, Texas, one of the “lessons learned” was this: Call in religion experts in a crisis where faith is a factor. This month, nearly 25 years after the debacle now simply referred to as “Waco,” FBI officials and scholars from the American Academy of Religion gathered at Harvard Divinity School to reflect on how the crisis in Texas led to a new relationship between them – and on the challenges ahead...After 51 days, law enforcement moved to end the standoff by force but had “no qualified knowledge of how highly religious people would respond to the storming of (their) building,” said retired Harvard law professor Philip Heymann. As deputy attorney general at the time, he authored a report in the aftermath of Waco that emphasized the need for seeking out religious expertise in dealing with confrontations.

...The international market for marijuana is booming. It’s set to reach $50 billion within a decade. And after spending millions to crack down on the drug, Jamaica’s government has decided it wants to cash in. It legalized medical marijuana and created a new licensing system to allow farmers to legally grow cannabis for medical, scientific or therapeutic purposes...According to the State Department, Jamaica is the largest Caribbean supplier of illegal pot to the United States. Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law professor with a lifelong interest in Jamaica says the federal government doesn’t want more weed coming in. But, Nesson says, keeping pot illegal in Jamaica means problems for small farmers like Baxter. “Criminalize something that is widely available to poor people, widely used by poor people — that leaves discretion in the police as to who they want to arrest,” he says.

Employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau returned to work after Thanksgiving break Monday to an unusual scenario: They had two bosses, separated by an ideological gulf, who were battling in court to lead them. In what could have made a decent reality TV plot dreamed up by Donald Trump in his previous jobs on the small screen, the president dispatched his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to take control of the independent agency as acting head after the departure of its former chief, Richard Cordray. But Cordray’s handpicked successor, Leandra English, the bureau’s former deputy director, was not giving up the reins and went to court Sunday night to block Trump’s move...Harvard law professor Howell Jackson, who worked for two years at the bureau as a visiting scholar, said both legal arguments on who can appoint a successor could be considered credible. But until a final determination is made in court, Jackson said, the agency’s work will be disrupted. “I’m sure it’s confusing for the people who work there,” he said. “And it will complicate any actions that are taken until the controversy resolves.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Now that Richard Cordray, the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has stepped down, President Trump wants his current budget director, former Republican congressman Mick Mulvaney, to head the CFPB in his spare time. It’s no wonder that he’d entrust the agency created to protect average Americans from unfair lending practices to a loyalist who flatly opposes the agency’s mission. But apart from his tendency to undercut nearly anything achieved during his predecessor’s tenure, and his ongoing demonstration that he cares not much about protecting the little guy — the “forgotten men and women” he waxed about with faux earnestness in his inaugural address — the president is going about it in a way that’s plainly illegal.

Two friends started a greeting card company on the internet. It was cheap to launch and it instantly reached millions. Then one day without warning, Facebook changed the way it did business. This is a story about survival in the age of Facebook, when a privately held algorithm can turn a beloved product into a hobby with no monetary value...What happened next, as the cards thrived and then suddenly withered on Facebook, illustrates the mercurial power of a new near-monopoly, with implications for all sorts of publishers and businesses, said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “Facebook has grown at a pace and had an impact that it’s really hard to say anybody planned,” he said. “It isn’t just a mere commercial platform. It’s a place that people are turning to to get their sense of what’s going on in the world."

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her allies are putting a full-court press on President Donald Trump and his administration as they battle over who has the authority to appoint the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency Warren championed after the financial crisis. The battle has ensued after both Trump and Richard Cordray, the recently departed head of the CFPB, both named separate successors at the agency. Cordray abruptly departed from the agency Friday...The liberal Harvard constitutional law professor, Laurence Tribe, told CNN that the original draft legislation creating CFPB in the House would have used the Federal Vacancies Act as the backing for naming an interim director..."And the law is very plain," he said. "The old law in 1998 was superseded by the new law. Time moves only in one direction. The 2011 law is specifically about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the most important bureau in the country protecting people from fraudulent lenders, from being gouged, from being abused."

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. The cellphones we carry with us constantly are the most perfect surveillance device ever invented, and our laws haven’t caught up to that reality. That might change soon. This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with profound implications on your security and privacy in the coming years. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unlawful search and seizure is a vital right that protects us all from police overreach, and the way the courts interpret it is increasingly nonsensical in our computerized and networked world. The Supreme Court can either update current law to reflect the world, or it can further solidify an unnecessary and dangerous police power.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Suits against President Donald Trump for abuse of executive power are an important tool for preserving the republic. But the newly filed suit by Democratic appointee Leandra English for the right to serve as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not helping the cause.

The future of AT&T could be shaped by two big decisions in Washington this week, with the Justice Department suing the telecom giant on Monday to block its $85 billion purchase of Time Warner and the Federal Communications Commission announcing a plan Tuesday to roll back net neutrality rules, handing a big win to Internet providers...Still, consumer advocates say relying on after-the-fact enforcement is no substitute for clear, preemptive rules that seek to prevent consumers from being harmed in the first place. "Taking FCC [rulemaking] power off the table leaves us with only antitrust authority to rely on to protect consumers," said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard University. "Which won't be enough, in the long run."

In recent months, prominent legal scholars on both sides of the political spectrum have proposed court-packing plans, or at least urged reconsideration of the longstanding political norm against court-packing. If such ideas take hold, it will be a very dangerous development... But in his most recent post on this subject, [Mark] Tushnet notes – with admirable candor – that “[t]he rationale is not (on the surface) to ‘seize control of the judiciary'” (emphasis added). That, of course, suggests that “seizing control” is a major part of the rationale beneath the surface.

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia `19 and Carlos Peña Ortiz. In an election and presidency filled with incendiary comments, Americans may have all but forgotten about comments like this made during Donald Trump’s campaign. Unfortunately, many Mexicans have not, and one man in particular — presidential frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador — might do something about it. As a populist wave swept through Europe, Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief as Emmanuel Macron declared victory in the French presidential election, seemingly ending the populist onslaught worldwide. However, in less than a year, America may once again be holding its breath as the Mexican presidential election takes place.

The Trump administration is sure to be hell for working people, but so far the actual Labor Secretary has been relatively quiet on the specifics...As explained at length here by former Labor Department official Sharon Block, the only real purpose for reclassifying worker centers is to make their lives harder by requiring them to do a ton of paperwork and follow a ton of new rules. There is no threat being addressed here, except the threat that day laborers might be paid a semi-living wage.

An op-ed by Matt Olsen. A core national security law allowing the government to collect intelligence information—Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—is set to expire at the end of the year. With the deadline looming, the debate in Congress over reauthorizing Section 702 now centers on a crucial issue: the FBI’s ability to search for clues in its databases. The focus on this issue is important. There is a national security imperative for the FBI to review quickly and efficiently data that the government has lawfully collected when the Bureau opens an investigation or identifies a new suspect, especially someone who may have links to terrorism or espionage.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Despite what Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome. Stephenson, the AT&T CEO, has no one but himself to blame. He and his minions effectively tanked their own plans to merge their company—the largest major pay-TV provider in the country and the second-largest wireless carrier—with Time Warner’s must-have cable channels and sports rights.

President Trump has dismissed global warming as a hoax, snubbed the Paris emissions pact and scrapped U.S. EPA climate rules. But executive actions can be fleeting — as the Trump administration has shown by moving swiftly to unravel many of President Obama's climate change policies. Yet there's a major piece of Trump's climate legacy that could be more enduring: his court picks...Richard Lazarus, an environmental law expert and professor at Harvard Law School, said courts have played an "outsized role" in climate policy in recent years because regulators are working with an old law to deal with a problem its authors weren't specifically addressing. "The reason why the courts play a big role right now is that, whether the executive branch is run by [President George W.] Bush or the executive branch is run by Obama, each time they're kind of stuck with old language," Lazarus said, noting that the 1970 Clean Air Act hasn't seen a major overhaul since 1990.

An op-ed by Maryanne Tomazic and Abbe Muller. Rhode Island blocks life-saving treatment for people living with Hepatitis C. The state Department of Human Services applies unnecessary restrictions on Medicaid patients suffering from this disease. These restrictions not only contradict medical and legal advice, but they impair Rhode Island’s ability to address a public health crisis.

New York is one of 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized medical marijuana––a trend that 94 percent of Americans support, according to an August Quinnipiac poll. But on December 8, all of that could begin to change. Congress has until that day to decide whether to include the Rohrabacher-Farr Act (also known as Rohrabacher-Blumenauer) in a bill that will fund the government through the next fiscal year...In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed back against the bill when he sent a strongly worded letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, asking them to oppose protections for legal weed and allow him to prosecute medical marijuana..."He’s old fashioned and very conservative," said Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor and former Justice Department official for the Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton administrations. "Literally seven years ago, maybe eight years ago, marijuana was thought to be a very dangerous drug. Why would he focus on this issue? Because he’s seven years out of date."

More than 2,000 conservatives in tuxedos and gowns recently filled Union Station’s main hall for a steak dinner and the chance to cheer the man who saved the Supreme Court from liberal control. Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t disappoint them, just as he hasn’t in his first seven months on the Supreme Court. “Tonight I can report that a person can be both a publicly committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court,” Gorsuch said to sustained applause from members of the Federalist Society, using terms by which conservatives often seek to distinguish themselves from more liberal judges... [Ian] Samuel, a professor at Harvard Law School and former Scalia law clerk, said Gorsuch has an obvious interest in questions about accountability in the American system of government and control over the court system. “It’s better that he puts it out there and says this is who I am. I don’t think he cares whether some people think it’s shocking,” Samuel said.

A battle over who should run the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the coming months was set for court as Obama-era holdovers sought to maintain their control over a powerful watchdog which President Donald Trump is seeking to curb...While the legal battle rages, the CFPB’s enforcement work will be put in limbo. “Anything that the agency does or fails to do could be subject to challenge until this cloud is removed,” said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.